


Winter's Frost

by skywardseanna17



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-18
Updated: 2014-06-18
Packaged: 2018-02-05 03:58:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1804456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skywardseanna17/pseuds/skywardseanna17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Bucky needs to rely on the kindness of strangers if he wants to find his own way in a world very different from the life of bloodshed and fear that he left behind at HYDRA. Part 1.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Winter's Frost

He dragged the soggy body out of the water and thrust it to the ground away from him. He looked at the man’s bloody face, watched him roll to one side unconsciously and cough up seawater. Confident that the man was alive, his rescuer swept the area with his gaze and made his way into the brushy forests that rimmed the patch of shoreline. He didn’t look back.  
He didn’t know how far he ran that day, or that night, or the following day. All he knew was that he didn’t want to stop to think about anything. Every time he stopped, he heard his voice inside his head, talking, laughing. Words he hadn’t heard for decades.  
So the assassin ran. Avoiding all signs of humanity, he made his way north of the Potomac.  
Darkness. The assassin thought that the sunlight was fading from the horizon, but it was moving in from all sides, hazy. The blackness rushed up at him, and he pitched forward, his metal arm tracking through the mud like a silver plow. He closed his eyes before he hit the ground.

He didn’t notice how close he had come to the road, or the small, rusty pickup truck that was just a speck in the distance, approaching fast. 

The assassin dreamed of something he had never experienced.  
An enormous red ballroom, lined with ivory columns and gilded floor tiles stretched in every direction, and all around him people danced. No waltzes or slow dances were played—just swing. A jumble of musicians was set up at the front of the ballroom, trumpets, saxophones, trombones, drums packed in tight, to allow room for more dancers. Couples whirled around each other in imperfect rhythms and synchronizations.  
He was being led across the ballroom by a young woman in a short green gown and curly black hair. They made it to the center of the dance floor, and she draped her forearms across the tops of his shoulders. His hands went to her waist. His hand was real flesh, blue veins at his wrist popped out, pumping blood and oxygen through his body. He stared at it and wiggled his fingers, feeling the fabric of the girl’s dress.  
The girl cleared her voice, and he brought his eyes back to her face. She must have thought I was looking at her waist, the assassin thought. He blushed, the unfamiliar flame creeping into his cheeks.  
The music started, and they were gone. The assassin couldn’t remember ever having danced, but these motions felt…natural, like they were something his body was used to doing but that his brain had forgotten how to do. They pitched their bodies across the floor, catching and throwing each other around the room like bouncing balls, always flying back to each other. She threw her head back and laughed, a freeing cry that called for a response. Infected with the dance and with her laughter, he smiled. The song came to an end and they held each other, gasping. No one else seemed to pay any attention to them—but he felt the hair turn up on the back of his neck. His blood cooling, he inclined his head ever so slightly to look behind him.  
A scrawny figure stared at the assassin from the dense group of people that rimmed the dance floor. The crowd whistled and cheered for more, but the figure just smiled at him and turned, pushing his way through the crowd and towards the double doors at the end of the dance hall. His face looked familiar…  
The man. The man…who was he? The assassin shrugged himself out of his dance partner’s embrace and ran after him, pushing open the double doors and into the white light.

 

He was blinded by the light of the dying evening sun that shot through the window, and pulled his arm across his eyes. The light refracted off the back of his hand. The assassin froze. His arm was not normal. It had been a dream.  
Dust motes glided through the air, disturbed by his irregular breathing. He sat up and checked his surroundings. He was sitting in a rusty cot with clean white sheets. Yellowed floral wallpaper was slowly curling its way free from the walls of the room. He swung his legs out and touched the cold tile floor with his toes. A bolt of pain shot up his leg. He looked down. His leg was badly bruised. He must have fractured it…he couldn’t remember when and he couldn’t tell how long it had been healing. Maybe a day. He tried thinking back, cycling through what had happened, what had gone wrong on his last mission. His head hurt—the assassin wasn’t used to having…memories. He stood up, stretching his muscles. A series of cracks and pops followed.  
“That’s more noise out of your bones than I heard out of mine when my healthcare still covered my chiropractor.”  
It was a woman, half in and half out of the doorway. He analyzed her like a machine: fifty-seven, with one Hispanic parent and one white parent, probably eastern European. She stood unaided, but most of her weight was placed on her left leg. Not a threat.  
“Where am I?” he asked, his voice scratchy from lack of use.  
“Just outside Pittsburgh. I found you passed out on my way back from New York—on the side of the road, looking dead. Thought you were. Took me forever to get you into the truck bed. You were kind of aware that I was trying to help, I think.” She smiled at him genuinely and waved at a chair in the corner of the small room. “There’s some clothes there—they were my son’s, so they should fit you fine. Bathroom’s the first door on your left down the hall.” 

 

He stepped into the bathroom. Tiny, with just a curtained section, toilet, sink, and murky skylight above. He could get out that way if he needed to. Running start, up off the sink, arm to the glass and he would be…  
Knocking at the door. “Do you need any help, dear?”  
“N-no, no.” He looked around. What did she expect him to do in here? He didn’t know a single thing about what normal people did. He only knew how to end people. He recognized the toilet—they had one of those at Hydra’s base, and he wasn’t stupid, but what was the curtain for? He yanked the it aside, revealing a smooth, tiled floor and shining faucets stuck in to the wall above his head. Multicolored bottles crowded the built in shelf.  
“The knob sticks a little, so make sure you give it a good tug.” Her footsteps traveled down the hallway and receded.  
Stepping into the stall, the sleeve of his shirt caught on the stiff curtain. He didn’t know what this knob did, but this woman had saved his life, and he owed her his trust. At least, until she betrayed it. He turned the knob.  
Water poured out of the faucet, hot and heavy, like rainwater in a summer thunderstorm. The assassin stumbled back against the curtain and fought not to scream. Spitting, he scrambled out of the stall and peeled off his now sopping clothes. He had not expected that.  
Completely naked, he glared at the steaming shower. He analyzed its construction. It looked as though a single person was meant to stand in it at once, and be assaulted for some period of time by the falling water. The assassin gritted his teeth and stepped back in. This time, he was expecting the heat, and the gentle sting of the water on his scratches and wounds was calming. He took a deep breath, and washed the blood and dirt from his body.

 

“Why did you save me? You could have just left me there.”  
The assassin sat down at the heavy kitchen table, watching her with undivided attention.  
“Hang on, now—I’ve got a pizza in the freezer that should go in the oven. And then we can do question for question,”  
He nodded. “That sounds…fair.”  
The woman pulled the pizza out of the freezer and cranked the dial on the oven. “Why don’t we start with introductions? My name is Lisa.”  
She leaned over the table and held her right arm out in front of him. He winced. Last time someone had done that to him, he had been smacked, and then mindwiped. She left her hand there, unmoving. Waiting. Slowly it dawned on him what she was asking for. His right hand trembled, but he took her hand in his own and shook it.  
A memory hit him, cold and sharp like metal. It was the little man from his dream, the one he chased through the dance hall. They were in a narrow, dark alleyway, and the assassin was reaching out his hand to help the scrawny man up from the pavement. His face was covered in bruises, and his lip was bleeding. He smiled through the blood, and his bright blue eyes met the assassin’s. “I had him on the ropes,” He reached out and took his hand.  
Another memory. It was dark, and the assassin was strapped to a table. Same hand reaching for him, same eyes staring through to his soul, but the scrawny kid was now anything but. He was enormous, taller even than the assassin, and wore the familiar blue costume with the white star on his chest. His eyes met the assassin’s, and his face crumpled in…relief. “Bucky. Oh my God, it’s me, it’s Steve”  
“Steve? Is that your name?” Steve was gone, and the assassin was still holding Lisa’s hand.  
“No, it’s…it’s Bucky. My name…my name is James Buchanon Barnes…I think.” Lisa released Bucky’s hand. “So, Bucky then,”  
“Yeah. For now, at least.”  
Lisa sat down across the cluttered table. “You asked me why I picked you up off that road. My psychotherapist sister would like to have you believe that it’s because you remind me of my son.”  
Lisa took a deep breath. “He looked like you very much. Toby… went missing when he was seventeen, about ten years ago. He had depression, and he used to talk about hearing voices in his head when he was younger, but he was the smartest kid…and he had such a bright future. He just stopped talking about his problems, and I guess I thought that they…they just went away.”  
She looked Bucky in the eye. “They didn’t. Toby left a note on his dresser, and he was gone,” She took a deep breath, and folded her hands in her lap. “I didn’t know if he was alive or dead, or what—they never even found him. How hard could it be to find a teenager on the lam?” He voice had risen, and she was wringing her hands. “He never let me cut his hair either, you know. It looked terrible on him, and it looks terrible on you.” Bucky choked on a laugh. Lisa sunk back in her chair. “But to be honest, you just looked like a guy who could use some help. Figured it’d be good for my karma. I would have called the medics if it hadn’t been for that.” She jabbed a finger at his left arm. “Figured you were some experiment on the run, and turning you in to the “authorities” might not be good for either of us. I don’t like people sniffing around in my life.”  
He nodded, her story seemed believable. Bucky still didn’t entirely understand this concept of “karma” or why it would want this nice lady to invite a killing machine into her home. But he knew that people did strange things for religion.  
“I believe it’s my turn to ask a question then.”  
Bucky nodded slowly. “ I’ll try to answer them, because I feel like I…owe you that. But I don’t have too many memories. They are coming back to me in waves.”  
Lisa nodded. “Where did you get that arm?”  
Pain. So much pain. His vision blurred. He saw snow coated tree tops above, heard the grunts of those who were dragging him through the December slush. Bucky looked down, saw a trail of blood leading to his shoulder…to where his arm used to be.  
“I fell.”  
“Helluva fall that must have been.” Lisa sat back in her chair and pushed her thin glasses further up on her nose. “If you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t have to. I understand that our pasts can be…painful. Especially when they’re buried. And your past,” she gestured at his arm. “It had to be pretty painful.”  
Bucky focused on the tantalizing smell of the pizza cooking in the oven. “You’re very understanding. But you don’t seem stupid. You know that I’m dangerous and that people are looking for me,” One of Lisa’s eyebrows went up and she smiled. “And if you’ve been anywhere near a tv monitor, computer, or cell phone, you have a fairly decent guess of where I came from. So hit me.”  
That was the most that Bucky had spoken in… he couldn’t remember how long. His hands shook, and a tingle of fear was beginning to worm its way up his spine.  
“You’re kind of right, I guess, which makes me kind of right,” she laughed. “I saw on tv that there was some kind of fireworks show in DC, and that some aspect of our intelligence, S.P.E.A.R or something,”  
“S.H.I.E.L.D,” Bucky corrected.  
“Sure, S.H.I.E.L.D, was,” here she made finger quotes, “compromised.”  
“And you think that I may have had something to do with it.”  
“I may not be Sherlock Holmes, but I can put two and two together.”  
I understood that reference, Bucky thought.  
The oven timer buzzed, and Lisa leaned forward in her chair, as if to get up and retrieve the pizza. Bucky got up first, and motioned for her to stay sitting. He ignored the red-and green plaid hot mitt magnetized to the refrigerator door, instead grabbing the pizza tray with his metal arm.  
“That doesn’t burn at all?” Lisa asked, looking impressed. Bucky shook his head. “I can feel things, but there aren’t any…pain receptors.” He quickly sliced the pizza, and Lisa told him where to look for the plates and cups. The last time he had eaten, it was two, maybe three days ago—the same MRE’s Hydra had always fed him. He hadn’t eaten pizza since…the forties…maybe even the thirties.  
Bucky wolfed down the pie, trying to hide his happy-pizza-noises unsuccessfully.  
Lisa ate only one piece. “We can get you some more real food in the morning—it’s just around midnight now. Frozen pizza is okay for snack food, but it looks like you could use a reintroduction to cuisine. You don’t look like you’ve eaten anything decent in a long time.”  
“Hmm…?” Bucky grinned, and his vision blurred. He was in a warm, sunlit kitchen, standing next to a willowy woman with a striped apron tied around her waist. She smiled down at him as he cracked an egg into a pan on the stovetop he could barely see above. She leaned in to kiss the top of his head.  
“You just go places sometimes, don’t you Bucky?” He blinked. It was Lisa staring down at him. “ You should get some sleep, kid. You’ve been through a lot”  
She left the kitchen, almost completely hiding her limp. Almost.

It was Bucky’s first dreamless night, uninterrupted by ghosts from the past or threats of the present. There was only the blissful, hazy future, unhaunted by frost-coated locked doors.

 

**In the next chapter, Steve and Bucky will reunite to face a new enemy**


End file.
